It’s finally nearing the end of 2020, a year that flew by and dragged at the same time. But now we need get planning for 2021 and beyond!
Seasonal SEO
SEO is especially a seasonal piece of work – search engines generally take around 3 months to find and properly index pages/blogs on your website with the keywords you have optimised for. So now in December is the perfect time to work on a blog post or a page for easter. Decide what product/service you would want to promote in easter now, build a page/category/product/blog etc. (whatever is relevant to you) and start optimising it now, ready for people to start searching in March. You can use Google Trends and Keyword Planner to find relevant keywords that are actually used by people to find that product/service and when and this can help start to build trends throughout the year.
If you look at some more ‘general terms for your business i.e. flower shop nearby and see when the particular trends are over a year – find the spikes and note these down, then make a reminder to work on optimising for those three months ahead.
Seasonal Content
Look up bank holiday, public holidays and some more ‘quirky’ days to give you inspiration for content. If you own a chocolate shop, highlight easter, mothers day, fathers day, Christmas on your calendar but also National Milk Chocolate Day (July 28th), National Chocolate Day (October 28th) or even National Chocolate Covered Anything Day (December 16th) and more to get a blog post, and perhaps even an offer, written around the day ready to put out on social media.
Try and create a fun buzz around your products outside of commonly known holidays when there will be lots of competition.
Seasonal doesn’t just mean the weather
Think about your business and when you know you will go into busier periods and quieter ones. Your seasonal work may vastly differ from other businesses, so again you need to plan your SEO and content accordingly. If you know you will have a spike of regular annual work in Aug – Oct each year then plan out content and SEO work so you’re not having to worry about churning these out during that time. Work a few months ahead and you’ll find that the usual stress about keeping on top of digital marketing will start to melt away and you can concentrate on everything else – keeping your service standards high etc.
Do I have to do this each year?
You’ll see the benefits of working on this year after year, not only will you have a fleshed-out seasonal calendar with good content days, but you’ll see how well these work in the first year you carry this out. SEO should then become much easier, as you don’t need to keep writing those blog posts and pages from scratch, but just update them to make sure search engines know that your website is still up to date and you can do another check on keyword planner to see if there are any better keywords that you can add as well.
Otherwise, that content and work will stay there and keep bringing in traffic over time, and can be re-purposed and re-used year after year to save you time as well.
If you need help building a seasonal plan or don’t have the time/resources to carry out the work, get in touch with us about our digital marketing services to see how we can help.